On the Edge: Earth's Tipping Points

By Our Hands: Cities are perhaps the most impressive mark humankind has left upon the face of planet Earth.Courtesy anaxila

Throughout the ongoing debate about exactly how, to what extent, and the ethical implications, the indisputable fact remains that humankind has altered the planet. Back when the human population was only a few thousand strong and agriculture and cooked food were the latest inventions, it was easy for the Joneses to pick up and move camp when the water ran dry, the soil stopped producing tasty wheat, or the garbage piled too high in the backyard. The same can’t be said for the populations of world cities today.

Advances in public health, industry, and agriculture have blown the human population out of the brush. There will soon be 9 billion people on the face of planet Earth! Coupled with rising affluence, our ballooning population’s resource consumption and waste outputs are wrecking havoc on natural systems. New research (see several links below for more info) suggests that within a fixed amount of space, humankind is in danger of causing our own extinction and the only way out is to discard traditional ideas of industrialization and embrace sustainability.

The first step to bailing out humankind is to investigate how close to failure the world actually is. This was the point of a recent international collaboration: to calculate safe limits for pivotal environmental processes. The key idea here is that of “tipping points,” which can be thought of as thresholds or breaking points. Think about being pestered by your brother or sister: aren’t you able to put up with the annoyance for even a little while before you get so upset you retaliate? That’s your tipping point – the last straw that put you over the edge.

Led by Stockholm Resilience Center’s Johan Rockstrom, a group of European, Australian, and American scientists – including the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment’s director, Jonathan Foley – identified nine processes reaching their tipping points. Three (climate change, nutrient cycles, and biodiversity loss) have already been pushed past their tipping points, four (ocean acidification, ozone depletion, freshwater use, and land use) are approaching their tipping points, and two (aerosol loading and chemical pollution) do not yet have identified tipping points because they require more research. The Institute on the Environment recently released a YouTube video addressing the conclusion of this new research:

Blissfully, there are things we can do to stop hurting the planet and begin patching its wounds. According to Foley’s article, we can’t let ourselves get any closer to the tipping points and piecemeal solutions won’t cut it because of the interconnectedness of the issues. Instead, we should focus on switching to low- or no-carbon fuel sources, stopping deforestation, and rethinking our approaches to agriculture.

The conclusions of this research have been well-accepted, but there has been some criticisms for 1) attempting to establish tipping points at all, and 2) for the appropriateness of the establish tipping points. If you would like more information, including commentaries, please check out the following sources:

The thing is, this is a difficult question for scientists to answer because humankind has never experienced anything like the rapid changes we are now. Traditional theory of tipping points says that it is virtually impossible to return to pre-tipped conditions after the threshold is past. However, the researchers who conducted this study, and other scientists considering the same question, seem more hopeful; many of the commentaries focus on actions we can take to have a positive impact.

I encourage you to check out some of the links provided above (and that are finally working correctly) for more information.

Perhaps we should stop choosing the term "dinosaur" for something that is unsuccessful. Dinosaurs dominated the Earth for about 165 million years. Compare that to the paltry 200,000 years that Homo Sapiens have walked the globe and we are the true failure among species.

absolutely wonderful. so glad to see something like this at the science museum. love it. just perfect. mind-boggling, what perfection! how interesting :] definate plus for sure! excellent great, yes, fantastic.

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